NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/comp/sys/transput/1246

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-23 | 2.0 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!munnari.oz.au!yoyo.aarnet.edu.au!news.adelaide.edu.au!news.adelaide.edu.au!jeremy
From: [e-mail] (Jeremy Webber)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.transputer
Subject: Re: IS Occam3 recursive?
Date: 24 Nov 92 08:42:41
Organization: Digital Arts Film and Television
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    <[e-mail]> <rob.722005143@dutncp8>
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In-reply-to: [e-mail]'s message of Tue, 17 Nov 1992 12:59:03 GMT

It seems that this argument has degenerated into two camps: those who
think Occam is more "reliable" than C because it doesn't have recursion,
and those who need to use recursion and therefore program in C (does
anyone use Pascal on the Transputer?)

The reason lack of recursion makes Occam more "reliable" seems to be
that the proponents of this argument can't think of a decent way to
allocate memory on a fixed-memory machine.  Given that many of these
proponents come from Inmos perhaps that explains why Inmos C handles
memory resources so badly...

For my own experience, I ported a largeish application from Occam to C,
still on the Transputer.  The result ran about the same speed, even
though the C compiler seems to generate code which runs much slower than
the Occam compiler.  The compensating factor was in algorithm
improvements made possible by the improved expressability of C.  The
result as also *much* more reliable than its Occam predecessor as I had
been able to remove large chunks of code which were only necessary in
the older system to get around the limitations of Occam, and could thus
devote my effort to improving the system instead of working around the
compiler.

    -jeremy

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